The vast majority of people who are likely to be affected by the legislation are doing their downloading on their parents' or their university's internet connection, or on a shared connection (probably in the landlord's name in rented accommodation) or using a 3G dongle, where the options are very limited. The number who are actually paying for their own connection with their own credit card, and therefore have the option to switch provider, is vanishingly small. Households increasingly have their broadband tied up with some subset of their phone or television, and the people who actually control the purchase have no incentive to switch to some sketchy ISP in order to enable their son's downloading. That's why the proposed legislation is both invidious (as it amounts to collective family punishment) and potentially effective (as it will cause homeowners to corral their young men).
Precisely. Tennant had done significant work with multiple TV production companies prior to Who, whereas Smith had done a couple of minor things. Tennant would have been been a reasonable casting for the RSC Hamlet even without the Doctor Who role. After all, he'd done multiple, successful seasons at Stratford (Lysander, Romeo, Touchstone: significant, career-building roles). To do Touchstone in the RST at 25 means you're pretty hot stuff (Patrick Stewart was 28 when he did the same thing: it worked out OK for him, too), and if you follow it with a well-received Romeo at 30 you'll be in any RSC director's list of people to call for Hamlet in your late thirties. Decent stabs at Touchstone and Romeo mean you can speak the verse. And his Hamlet proved that he has fantastic speaking skills: he looked top class next to Stewart and Pennie Downie, who are amongst the greats.
Tennant may not be the greatest British Shakespearian actor of his generation --- Jonathan Slinger probably gets that nod at the moment, after his Richards in 2007/8 --- but he's very, very good and his Hamlet sits alongside Branagh's as one of the best in recent years. Who knows what Tennant will be like in his late sixties, as Patrick Stewart was for his recent Anthony, Prospero, Macbeth and Claudius (with a side-order of Vladimir in Godot) --- I saw all of those bar the Anthony, and he was superb --- but at the moment in his forties the RSC would kill to have Tennant on hand to do Henry V or Richard II. And in ten years' time he's going to be the defining Prospero of the 2020s. The BBC got a bargain for his Who, as he's the first serious actor to take the part.
By the way, another Who name to watch: Sam Troughton, son of David, grandson of Patrick. Stunning Romeo this year.
BT already have a de jure universal service obligation for voice (and, 14K4, or it might be 28K8, modem), so copper pairs are universal. BT already have a je facto USO for DSL. The problem is that there are a handful of not-spots outside the reach of any meaningful DSL, and the 2Mbps proposal is quite challenging as there are a lot of places that will only get ~0.5Mbps even with ADSL 2+. There are some regulatory and technical complexities with fibre to the cabinet, and for low-density rural areas it end up substantially under-provisioning the line cards (ie there's only a dozen or so premises within reach of one cabinet).
if you think record covers are a means of distributing porno
Several countries had a problem with the Blind Faith album, and I think unsurprisingly so: it's such a fine line between clever and stupid, and in that case I think paying 11 year old girls forty quid to pose naked in order to get a buzz about an album half of which consists of a shapeless jam is pretty bad. The Scorpions album is often credited as being the inspiration for Smell The Glove. I don't think either The Scorpions or Eric Clapton would do the same thing today. Both of those records overtly sexualise pubescent girls so that sexually inadequate rock fans can get their jollies, and although I don't think either of them justifies banning or censorship, they represent an attitude towards sex, children and women that is today unacceptable. They're bad cases to fight censorship over, because they are both ugly, stupid and exploitative (like, in both cases, the music on the album).
The UK has an effective system which enjoys largely popular support. An independent organisation, with clear governance, provides a list of URLs that contain illegal content. Those URLs are blocked on a voluntary basis by consumer ISPs. The performance hit is a red herring: the technology used is two-stage, so only the IP numbers that are hosting the material are proxied (it's done by injecting local/32 routes to a transparent proxy, mostly). Although there's an iron fist in the velvet glove of voluntary filtering, in that government has threatened to legislate, in reality every ISP is on board. Business connections may or may not be so filtered.
There have been fuck-ups, most notably the Virgin Killer affair which (a) revealed that Wikipedia doesn't play nicely with ISP-level proxying and (b) there are edge-cases in the law on child porn. The argument that the record cover in question isn't child porn is weak, but the whole affair was mis-handled.
Is the system perfect? No. Because it was never intended to be. A proxy or an https tunnel or any number of other things will subvert it. The effect is more straight-forward: it removes the ``oh, I stumbled over it accidentally'' defence, and prevents pressure to impose filtering for anything other than illegality. In the grand British spirit of compromise (which tends not to sit well with the American desire for 100% legal clarity) it does a reasonable job reasonably, and if it lost public confidence it would rapidly have to adapt.
The Australian problem is that (a) it's being imposed by legislative fiat, rather than emerging from industry debate (the UK system arose from a couple of the major ISPs) (b) Australia has some states that are culturally conservative that the central government isn't prepared to overrule (a problem we don't have in the UK) and (c) there's a skein of support for strong censorship that neither the UK nor the US suffers from.
In case it wasn't entirely obvious, these are jokes. The whole process is a farce, so people are making jokes. I know, I know, I shouldn't have to say.
I think it's somewhat better than you describe, in that it is at least feeding the ciphertext back into the permutation. It would depend on how it was used as to how much benefit that gave.
It's reasonable to assume that in a communications network, there would be a setting for the day or week. If that were used unmodified, identical opening phrases would encrypt identically, and would then diverge at the point the plaintext diverged. As with Enigma or Purple there's weak diffusion: the only thing that affects characters 1..n of the ciphertext are the key setting and characters 1..n of the plaintext (contrast a block cipher, where the two blocks whose plaintext differ only in the last byte will generate ciphertext that potentially differs throughout). Without careful use, which would have been unlikely in 1918 given the Germans screwed this up in the 1940s, stereotypical opening sequences would expose a lot of the key.
If an initial sequence were generated randomly for each message, so that the message itself starts with the alphabets already significantly permuted, that problem goes away. But generation of random initial sequences is hard. Again, the Germans screwed this up, and although it's not performing the same job the Herivel Tip seems relevant for any mechanical system.
As you say, locating plaintext within the message is also plausible with a computer or even a Colussus device, although it would be very complex by paper methods: for a conjectured plaintext, you can predict the transformations of the input and output alphabets, and (I suspect) the better attacks would come from conjectured or known plaintext that contains repeated letters.
The unfortunate problem is that advertising isn't a sustainable business model. Advertising as a way to fund content arose in two particular niches: newspaper and magazine publication is one, commercial television (as opposed to UK-style tax-funded) is the other. In both cases, at least initially, the advertising had some useful properties:
It couldn't trivially be avoided, which made it look good to advertisers
No-one really knew how much attention people paid, which made it easier for content companies to sell
No-one really knew how effective it was, which made it easier for ad agencies to mystify their clients
Unfortunately, none of that's true any more. Printed material is a narrower and narrower market, and although page-display rates in The New Yorker won't be tanking any time soon, the value of a display ad in a daily newspaper is through the floor. And everyone can skip adverts on the TV by just running a PVR a few minutes in arrears. For digital media, page impressions can be measured. And it's getting easier and easier to trace click-throughs and conversions back to individual adverts. So the advertising space is worth less, in some cases worthless, and agencies can make a much better judgement on which parts of their adverts are working.
Moreover, there is less and less willingness to see advertising as an inevitable evil, or even as something there's a patriotic duty to watch. The logic of content providers appears to be that as they won't or can't paywall (for reasons that aren't entirely clear), the only thing left is adverts, and therefore it's unsporting of people to point out the flaws in the model. If people either block, ignore or go `meh', especially in the contracting economy, the value of advertising falls. There's something that can be done to fix that. Making the adverts louder and brasher doesn't work.
We know it doesn't work, because in Europe we have a legally enforceable equivalent of the US `Do Not Call' register, which does not have all the weak exemptions of the American version. Everyone with enough neurons to have an income is on it, so outbound telemarketing is effectively dead: the companies still doing it are chasing a smaller and smaller pool of people who are not opted out, and as the obnoxiousness rises, the incentive to opt out rises with it. Soon every telemarketer will be getting the engaged tone from the one person left accepting their calls. Web advertising has the same problem: as more and more people avoid it (and, to be clear, the Safari Reader mode is an absolute game changer) the median income of people still reading adverts will fall. That's a death spiral.
My contention is that Rupert Murdoch is rarely wrong (Myspace was a rare misstep). He was long-term right about the Wapping strike, although people told him to surrender. He was long-term right about satellite TV and sports rights, although people told him to stop wasting money. Betting against The DIrty DIgger is not for the faint-hearted. I think advertising as a means to fund mass-market communication will die over the next twenty years, and we will see a slimmer market for commercial content, funded by micro-payments. There's no positive argument for advertising: it only exists because the advertisers want it to, and because the content providers believe it's the only model they can use. With no consumer pull, and declining practicality, why should it survive?
Of course, it probably means The New Yorker will cost me $6 an issue. But as it's currently only $140 to have forty-six issues a year AIRMAILED to Europe, that's obviously a ludicrously subsidised price. Advertising is like the emperor's clothes: it exists because no-one dares to believe it can't. But in the end, it won't.
Were the endless expansionism of a small part of the EU technocracy to actually be made flesh, the EU would disintegrate. Turkey may want to join the EU: for practical purposes, no-one outside the political elite of the EU wants them to join. Here in the UK, even politicians who _are_ part of the EU elite talk of long-term limits on admission of Turks into the labour market, while everyone else (including the government for the next five years) ignores it in the hope it will go away.
Turkey has a population that would make it one of the largest EU countries, an economy which would make it one of the poorest EU countries, politics that would make it one of the most unstable EU countries, education that would make it one of the least skilled EU countries and religion that would make it one of the most dangerous EU countries. It would also give the EU a porous land border with Iran, which would make Turkish entry into the Schengen group simply impossible.
Most of the EU countries imposed strict limits on the `accession countries' of Eastern Europe. The British government didn't, and it's hardly controversial to say that probably (amongst other things) cost Labour the 2010 election. Eastern European immigration driving down wages and conditions is a toxic political issue, to make Mexican immigration into the US look like a minor local issue. Turkish accession would have all the same problems, plus Islam, plus more poverty, plus a trigger-happy military.
It's unimaginable that it will happen, but certainly Britain, probably France, certainly Italy, probably the Benelux countries and as sure as eggs is eggs Germany would impose barriers that would make Turkey's membership almost pointless: they would be denied access to labour markets, capital markets, the Euro and Schengen. It would also result in Britain and potentially France making serious moves to leave the EU, and would bring down most governments west of Berlin. It would bring the Constitutional Referendum debacle back into the agenda, cause several countries to renege on the Lisbon Treaty and generally smash the EU governance to pieces.
Numbers: the peak Apollo-era budget was around $6 billion in 1966, which according to the government's CPI calculator, is about $40 billion in 2010 dollars. NASA's actual current-year budget is less than half that, a bit under $19 billion.
So that explains why NASA are now only launching one or two moon missions per year and only developing a complete new launch and crew system every ten years rather than every five? Yes?
Or, less sarcastically, the value being extracted with 50% of the budget isn't even 10% of the Apollo era.
As a minor point, SVR2 and SVR3 machines can't have symlinks, as the filesystem didn't include the functionality. What's referred to as `ufs' on, say, a Sun today is the Berkeley ffs or fffs; ufs in the context of Xenix is what's now sometimes called s5fs, which is a thinly veiled version of the Sixth and Seventh edition filesystem. I think there were 512 byte and 1 kilobyte versions.
The correct way to shift the data off will be with uucp. SVR2 and SVR3 both shipped with HoneyDanBer uucp, and it'll interwork with modern equivalents; g protocol is the best bet. cpio and uucp should be enough to move the data.
As others have pointed out, the SSID is part of the hashing of the passphrase that goes to make up a WPA2 key. I therefore generate the SSID and the passphrase with a reasonably strong random number generator (openssl), leaving a reasonable period between the two steps to reduce the chance of any correlation. That way, it is highly unlikely that a set of pre-computed tables will be of use, forcing any attacker to attempt a brute-force search from cold. Given that the key is also a randomly-chosen string, the only way that my network is weaker than brute-force is if there's a practical attack that is better than brute force, and in that scenario key selection is unlikely to help me.
I've got a 64GB RunCore in my (hackintosh) Mini9. Yes, it's an insane amount of money, but I use the thing as my primary laptop. I've also bonded a slab of carbon-fibre pre-preg to the lid to make the whole thing a bit stronger.
And you need to actually realise there's a bug there.
If the effect of a bug is for an application to crash, or (if in some ideal world someone's thought to do this) hit an assert, or an OS to panic, it's in a sense easy: you know that in some way the code has hit an explicit (assert, call to panic) or implicit (dereference zero) pre-condition and died. You know where it died, you have some chance of finding what was happening beforehand depending on the sharpness of your preparation, you have it all.
Now, consider the recent Ubuntu ``32K states for certificate generation'' http://www.formortals.com/all-2006-2008-debian-ubuntu-crypto-keys-worthless/ problem. That didn't cause any of the above. It might, in some ideal world, have failed a test suite, but how many distinct certificates do you generate before there's `enough'? And to throw extra fat on the fire, if memory serves the bug was introduced by someone attempting to get a clean pass from a static analysis tool (or gcc -Wall --- it's the same principle).
But, for two years, that lurked there. As an open-source and security community, it's a real mark of Cain, and we should understand why it happened. Because it says very bad things about process, correctness and testing.
I'm currently marking an essay which includes several references to things being defiantly true or defiantly false. It's possible that this is referring to the intensity of debate. It's more likely someone who misspelt definitely, an error which a spell-check won't pick up.
No, that's not the main reason. And I speak as someone who's owned 96, 99, 900, 9000, 9-3 of several types.
In the dim and distant past (say, a 1972 Saab 96V4), Saabs had the ignition switch on the dashboard like every other car did. Very few cars of the vintage cared much about theft, and specifically steering column locks were only just starting to arrive. The 96 has a column gear shift, and by the time they became four-stroke cars they'd also acquired four-speed gear boxes with an H shift pattern, plus a reverse in a third row locked out with a big spring. In passing, the 96V4 also had a selectable free wheel, like a push bike, so the four-stroke version (which has appreciable engine braking) could be driven like the two stroke version (which doesn't). Rather than re-engineer the steering and move the ignition switch onto the column in order to keep up with modern trends for theft prevention, Saab instead just modified the gear shift so that you had to put the car into reverse before you could remove the key, and the lock mechanism engaged on a pawl to hold the gear lever in reverse. So if you hot-wired the car, you'd be driving round in reverse.
One early prototype of the 99 also had a column shift and (essentially) 96 driveline, but the car was designed around the Riccardo/Triumph `B' slant-four engine and the gearbox ended up on the front behind the radiator, so a floor shift made a lot more sense. By then `lock it in reverse' was part of Saab tradition, so the ignition switch went down to the floor as well. Saab were also early (on the 99) in worrying about steering columns for crash safety and they were keen to have the column able to collapse smoothly without needing to have the mountings for a column lock in the way.
The 90 and 900 are just bigger 99s, so had the same mechanical layout.
The 9000 was an attempt to be `more normal' (that's often blamed on the Type 4 collaboration that also gave Lancia Thema, Fiat Croma and Alfa 164, but actually the designs diverged a lot and the power is from a transverse-mounted Saab H Engine, so there was no real reason forced on them) so has a normal steering lock, but for the GM 900 (later early 9-3), 9-5 and current 9-3 the shift went back down the floor. The manuals lock in reverse, the autos in park, but (I'm pretty sure: my wife's just taken the 9-3 for the day, so I can't check) there's also an electro-mechanical steering lock. Not that much of this stuff matters these days, because the real theft protection is the ECU immobiliser driven off the key electronics. Locking in park isn't unusual: my VAG DSG gearbox'd Skoda does that, but locking in reverse is still a Saab `thing'.
The best Saab I owned was a 99, which I finally sold with about 180K miles on, as a going concern with an MoT and a healthy life in front of it. I wish I'd kept it. The current one, a 9-3 estate, is overly GM-ish, but still has nice seats that don't hurt my wife's back, which is the main reason we buy Saabs.
It is remarkable the amount of vitriol that people will unleash at free software here on Slashdot. The software is released free by volunteers. If you like it, use it. If you don't like it, use something else. A rant about ``I don't care'' and ``I've never heard'' and ``What have they developed'' might be fitting were this the behaviour of a large, market-dominating for-money application, but in fact it's a volunteer effort producing free software. You attitude seems to lack just a hint of proportion, and has no perspective whatsoever.
Which is all true, but I think misses one important point: you do need to consider the complexity order of your algorithms. I've seen several applications which do ludicrous O(n^2) or worse operations, and by the time they get to see a dataset large enough to provoke serious problems no-one dares touch the basic methods, so all that's left is local code optimisation or throwing more hardware at the problem. And if the problem is that you used an O(n^2) sort rather than an O(n.log(n)) sort, or you computed a cross-product of two large tables O(n^2) at least for both space and time), or you needlessly wrote some hideous O(n!) search which is NP complete, then no amount of profiling and instruction tuning is ever going to help you. I think that at the outset of a design process, it's important to consider the complexity order of any algorithm used which has the potential to process large amounts of data, as otherwise you can see some startlingly bad performance problems as you scale.
I have more than once taken a bag of peanuts onto a train or plane as a snack. What's next: frisking for nuts?
I must confess, I would need a lot of convincing that the risks for people who claim nut allergy are remotely as severe as is made out. We live in a world surrounded by nuts: they are a staple snack for sale wherever you buy fuel for your car, are routinely sold and consumed on trains (even from the onboard shop or the refreshment trolley) and I was served them as part of a snack on a plane only a couple of weeks ago. Were the problem as severe as is made out, there should be deaths in large quantity, and there simply aren't. Indeed, the last time I tried to find out, there hadn't been a single death in the UK in some years.
What appears to happen is that vague irritation type allergies have been inflated into potential death. If I eat hazelnuts my lips swell slightly. If I'm exposed to cat dust the same thing happens. A bit of anti-histamine helps, or after an hour it goes down. Given the uncontrolled nuts present in society (they may be controlled in primary schools, but no-where else) and the absence of death, I think it's as much overreaction as reality. More, probably.
Indeed, if you fly on a Japanese plane to or from Japan, especially in winter, you'll see quite a lot of people wearing masks, as in the streets or on a train.
if you try to sell and identical wine, but made in California, you will be sued for trademark violation
That's going to come as news to Mumm, as their Cuvee Napa is going to have some problems.
There are endless `methode champagnoise' wines made, in California, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. You just can't call them champagne. Similarly, you can't call US-style whiskies Bourbon unless they're made in Bourbon (much to Jack Daniels' rue), Scotch-style whiskies Scotch unless they're made in Scotland (much to Suntory's rue) and so on.
This isn't trademark law, but it's enforced through a complex web of agreements over national and regional origin.
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of people who are likely to be affected by the legislation are doing their downloading on their parents' or their university's internet connection, or on a shared connection (probably in the landlord's name in rented accommodation) or using a 3G dongle, where the options are very limited. The number who are actually paying for their own connection with their own credit card, and therefore have the option to switch provider, is vanishingly small. Households increasingly have their broadband tied up with some subset of their phone or television, and the people who actually control the purchase have no incentive to switch to some sketchy ISP in order to enable their son's downloading. That's why the proposed legislation is both invidious (as it amounts to collective family punishment) and potentially effective (as it will cause homeowners to corral their young men).
Tennant may not be the greatest British Shakespearian actor of his generation --- Jonathan Slinger probably gets that nod at the moment, after his Richards in 2007/8 --- but he's very, very good and his Hamlet sits alongside Branagh's as one of the best in recent years. Who knows what Tennant will be like in his late sixties, as Patrick Stewart was for his recent Anthony, Prospero, Macbeth and Claudius (with a side-order of Vladimir in Godot) --- I saw all of those bar the Anthony, and he was superb --- but at the moment in his forties the RSC would kill to have Tennant on hand to do Henry V or Richard II. And in ten years' time he's going to be the defining Prospero of the 2020s. The BBC got a bargain for his Who, as he's the first serious actor to take the part.
By the way, another Who name to watch: Sam Troughton, son of David, grandson of Patrick. Stunning Romeo this year.
BT already have a de jure universal service obligation for voice (and, 14K4, or it might be 28K8, modem), so copper pairs are universal. BT already have a je facto USO for DSL. The problem is that there are a handful of not-spots outside the reach of any meaningful DSL, and the 2Mbps proposal is quite challenging as there are a lot of places that will only get ~0.5Mbps even with ADSL 2+. There are some regulatory and technical complexities with fibre to the cabinet, and for low-density rural areas it end up substantially under-provisioning the line cards (ie there's only a dozen or so premises within reach of one cabinet).
Several countries had a problem with the Blind Faith album, and I think unsurprisingly so: it's such a fine line between clever and stupid, and in that case I think paying 11 year old girls forty quid to pose naked in order to get a buzz about an album half of which consists of a shapeless jam is pretty bad. The Scorpions album is often credited as being the inspiration for Smell The Glove. I don't think either The Scorpions or Eric Clapton would do the same thing today. Both of those records overtly sexualise pubescent girls so that sexually inadequate rock fans can get their jollies, and although I don't think either of them justifies banning or censorship, they represent an attitude towards sex, children and women that is today unacceptable. They're bad cases to fight censorship over, because they are both ugly, stupid and exploitative (like, in both cases, the music on the album).
There have been fuck-ups, most notably the Virgin Killer affair which (a) revealed that Wikipedia doesn't play nicely with ISP-level proxying and (b) there are edge-cases in the law on child porn. The argument that the record cover in question isn't child porn is weak, but the whole affair was mis-handled.
Is the system perfect? No. Because it was never intended to be. A proxy or an https tunnel or any number of other things will subvert it. The effect is more straight-forward: it removes the ``oh, I stumbled over it accidentally'' defence, and prevents pressure to impose filtering for anything other than illegality. In the grand British spirit of compromise (which tends not to sit well with the American desire for 100% legal clarity) it does a reasonable job reasonably, and if it lost public confidence it would rapidly have to adapt.
The Australian problem is that (a) it's being imposed by legislative fiat, rather than emerging from industry debate (the UK system arose from a couple of the major ISPs) (b) Australia has some states that are culturally conservative that the central government isn't prepared to overrule (a problem we don't have in the UK) and (c) there's a skein of support for strong censorship that neither the UK nor the US suffers from.
And they that sarcasm doesn't travel well.
In case it wasn't entirely obvious, these are jokes. The whole process is a farce, so people are making jokes. I know, I know, I shouldn't have to say.
I think it's somewhat better than you describe, in that it is at least feeding the ciphertext back into the permutation. It would depend on how it was used as to how much benefit that gave.
It's reasonable to assume that in a communications network, there would be a setting for the day or week. If that were used unmodified, identical opening phrases would encrypt identically, and would then diverge at the point the plaintext diverged. As with Enigma or Purple there's weak diffusion: the only thing that affects characters 1..n of the ciphertext are the key setting and characters 1..n of the plaintext (contrast a block cipher, where the two blocks whose plaintext differ only in the last byte will generate ciphertext that potentially differs throughout). Without careful use, which would have been unlikely in 1918 given the Germans screwed this up in the 1940s, stereotypical opening sequences would expose a lot of the key.
If an initial sequence were generated randomly for each message, so that the message itself starts with the alphabets already significantly permuted, that problem goes away. But generation of random initial sequences is hard. Again, the Germans screwed this up, and although it's not performing the same job the Herivel Tip seems relevant for any mechanical system.
As you say, locating plaintext within the message is also plausible with a computer or even a Colussus device, although it would be very complex by paper methods: for a conjectured plaintext, you can predict the transformations of the input and output alphabets, and (I suspect) the better attacks would come from conjectured or known plaintext that contains repeated letters.
Unfortunately, none of that's true any more. Printed material is a narrower and narrower market, and although page-display rates in The New Yorker won't be tanking any time soon, the value of a display ad in a daily newspaper is through the floor. And everyone can skip adverts on the TV by just running a PVR a few minutes in arrears. For digital media, page impressions can be measured. And it's getting easier and easier to trace click-throughs and conversions back to individual adverts. So the advertising space is worth less, in some cases worthless, and agencies can make a much better judgement on which parts of their adverts are working.
Moreover, there is less and less willingness to see advertising as an inevitable evil, or even as something there's a patriotic duty to watch. The logic of content providers appears to be that as they won't or can't paywall (for reasons that aren't entirely clear), the only thing left is adverts, and therefore it's unsporting of people to point out the flaws in the model. If people either block, ignore or go `meh', especially in the contracting economy, the value of advertising falls. There's something that can be done to fix that. Making the adverts louder and brasher doesn't work.
We know it doesn't work, because in Europe we have a legally enforceable equivalent of the US `Do Not Call' register, which does not have all the weak exemptions of the American version. Everyone with enough neurons to have an income is on it, so outbound telemarketing is effectively dead: the companies still doing it are chasing a smaller and smaller pool of people who are not opted out, and as the obnoxiousness rises, the incentive to opt out rises with it. Soon every telemarketer will be getting the engaged tone from the one person left accepting their calls. Web advertising has the same problem: as more and more people avoid it (and, to be clear, the Safari Reader mode is an absolute game changer) the median income of people still reading adverts will fall. That's a death spiral.
My contention is that Rupert Murdoch is rarely wrong (Myspace was a rare misstep). He was long-term right about the Wapping strike, although people told him to surrender. He was long-term right about satellite TV and sports rights, although people told him to stop wasting money. Betting against The DIrty DIgger is not for the faint-hearted. I think advertising as a means to fund mass-market communication will die over the next twenty years, and we will see a slimmer market for commercial content, funded by micro-payments. There's no positive argument for advertising: it only exists because the advertisers want it to, and because the content providers believe it's the only model they can use. With no consumer pull, and declining practicality, why should it survive?
Of course, it probably means The New Yorker will cost me $6 an issue. But as it's currently only $140 to have forty-six issues a year AIRMAILED to Europe, that's obviously a ludicrously subsidised price. Advertising is like the emperor's clothes: it exists because no-one dares to believe it can't. But in the end, it won't.
http://www.technologyinthehome.com/Shop/TV-AND-Visual/310-Mini-Scart-Freeview-Digital-TV-Receiver-AND-Recorder.html
Were the endless expansionism of a small part of the EU technocracy to actually be made flesh, the EU would disintegrate. Turkey may want to join the EU: for practical purposes, no-one outside the political elite of the EU wants them to join. Here in the UK, even politicians who _are_ part of the EU elite talk of long-term limits on admission of Turks into the labour market, while everyone else (including the government for the next five years) ignores it in the hope it will go away.
Turkey has a population that would make it one of the largest EU countries, an economy which would make it one of the poorest EU countries, politics that would make it one of the most unstable EU countries, education that would make it one of the least skilled EU countries and religion that would make it one of the most dangerous EU countries. It would also give the EU a porous land border with Iran, which would make Turkish entry into the Schengen group simply impossible.
Most of the EU countries imposed strict limits on the `accession countries' of Eastern Europe. The British government didn't, and it's hardly controversial to say that probably (amongst other things) cost Labour the 2010 election. Eastern European immigration driving down wages and conditions is a toxic political issue, to make Mexican immigration into the US look like a minor local issue. Turkish accession would have all the same problems, plus Islam, plus more poverty, plus a trigger-happy military.
It's unimaginable that it will happen, but certainly Britain, probably France, certainly Italy, probably the Benelux countries and as sure as eggs is eggs Germany would impose barriers that would make Turkey's membership almost pointless: they would be denied access to labour markets, capital markets, the Euro and Schengen. It would also result in Britain and potentially France making serious moves to leave the EU, and would bring down most governments west of Berlin. It would bring the Constitutional Referendum debacle back into the agenda, cause several countries to renege on the Lisbon Treaty and generally smash the EU governance to pieces.
As the documents point out, it's the same API used for Amazon EC3 and others. They're implementing someone else's protocol.
This isn't like copyright infringement. Replacing patented methods and concepts in an already-existing implementation is extremely complex.
So that explains why NASA are now only launching one or two moon missions per year and only developing a complete new launch and crew system every ten years rather than every five? Yes?
Or, less sarcastically, the value being extracted with 50% of the budget isn't even 10% of the Apollo era.
As a minor point, SVR2 and SVR3 machines can't have symlinks, as the filesystem didn't include the functionality. What's referred to as `ufs' on, say, a Sun today is the Berkeley ffs or fffs; ufs in the context of Xenix is what's now sometimes called s5fs, which is a thinly veiled version of the Sixth and Seventh edition filesystem. I think there were 512 byte and 1 kilobyte versions. The correct way to shift the data off will be with uucp. SVR2 and SVR3 both shipped with HoneyDanBer uucp, and it'll interwork with modern equivalents; g protocol is the best bet. cpio and uucp should be enough to move the data.
As others have pointed out, the SSID is part of the hashing of the passphrase that goes to make up a WPA2 key. I therefore generate the SSID and the passphrase with a reasonably strong random number generator (openssl), leaving a reasonable period between the two steps to reduce the chance of any correlation. That way, it is highly unlikely that a set of pre-computed tables will be of use, forcing any attacker to attempt a brute-force search from cold. Given that the key is also a randomly-chosen string, the only way that my network is weaker than brute-force is if there's a practical attack that is better than brute force, and in that scenario key selection is unlikely to help me.
I've got a 64GB RunCore in my (hackintosh) Mini9. Yes, it's an insane amount of money, but I use the thing as my primary laptop. I've also bonded a slab of carbon-fibre pre-preg to the lid to make the whole thing a bit stronger.
And you need to actually realise there's a bug there. If the effect of a bug is for an application to crash, or (if in some ideal world someone's thought to do this) hit an assert, or an OS to panic, it's in a sense easy: you know that in some way the code has hit an explicit (assert, call to panic) or implicit (dereference zero) pre-condition and died. You know where it died, you have some chance of finding what was happening beforehand depending on the sharpness of your preparation, you have it all. Now, consider the recent Ubuntu ``32K states for certificate generation'' http://www.formortals.com/all-2006-2008-debian-ubuntu-crypto-keys-worthless/ problem. That didn't cause any of the above. It might, in some ideal world, have failed a test suite, but how many distinct certificates do you generate before there's `enough'? And to throw extra fat on the fire, if memory serves the bug was introduced by someone attempting to get a clean pass from a static analysis tool (or gcc -Wall --- it's the same principle). But, for two years, that lurked there. As an open-source and security community, it's a real mark of Cain, and we should understand why it happened. Because it says very bad things about process, correctness and testing.
I'm currently marking an essay which includes several references to things being defiantly true or defiantly false. It's possible that this is referring to the intensity of debate. It's more likely someone who misspelt definitely, an error which a spell-check won't pick up.
No, that's not the main reason. And I speak as someone who's owned 96, 99, 900, 9000, 9-3 of several types. In the dim and distant past (say, a 1972 Saab 96V4), Saabs had the ignition switch on the dashboard like every other car did. Very few cars of the vintage cared much about theft, and specifically steering column locks were only just starting to arrive. The 96 has a column gear shift, and by the time they became four-stroke cars they'd also acquired four-speed gear boxes with an H shift pattern, plus a reverse in a third row locked out with a big spring. In passing, the 96V4 also had a selectable free wheel, like a push bike, so the four-stroke version (which has appreciable engine braking) could be driven like the two stroke version (which doesn't). Rather than re-engineer the steering and move the ignition switch onto the column in order to keep up with modern trends for theft prevention, Saab instead just modified the gear shift so that you had to put the car into reverse before you could remove the key, and the lock mechanism engaged on a pawl to hold the gear lever in reverse. So if you hot-wired the car, you'd be driving round in reverse. One early prototype of the 99 also had a column shift and (essentially) 96 driveline, but the car was designed around the Riccardo/Triumph `B' slant-four engine and the gearbox ended up on the front behind the radiator, so a floor shift made a lot more sense. By then `lock it in reverse' was part of Saab tradition, so the ignition switch went down to the floor as well. Saab were also early (on the 99) in worrying about steering columns for crash safety and they were keen to have the column able to collapse smoothly without needing to have the mountings for a column lock in the way. The 90 and 900 are just bigger 99s, so had the same mechanical layout. The 9000 was an attempt to be `more normal' (that's often blamed on the Type 4 collaboration that also gave Lancia Thema, Fiat Croma and Alfa 164, but actually the designs diverged a lot and the power is from a transverse-mounted Saab H Engine, so there was no real reason forced on them) so has a normal steering lock, but for the GM 900 (later early 9-3), 9-5 and current 9-3 the shift went back down the floor. The manuals lock in reverse, the autos in park, but (I'm pretty sure: my wife's just taken the 9-3 for the day, so I can't check) there's also an electro-mechanical steering lock. Not that much of this stuff matters these days, because the real theft protection is the ECU immobiliser driven off the key electronics. Locking in park isn't unusual: my VAG DSG gearbox'd Skoda does that, but locking in reverse is still a Saab `thing'. The best Saab I owned was a 99, which I finally sold with about 180K miles on, as a going concern with an MoT and a healthy life in front of it. I wish I'd kept it. The current one, a 9-3 estate, is overly GM-ish, but still has nice seats that don't hurt my wife's back, which is the main reason we buy Saabs.
It is remarkable the amount of vitriol that people will unleash at free software here on Slashdot. The software is released free by volunteers. If you like it, use it. If you don't like it, use something else. A rant about ``I don't care'' and ``I've never heard'' and ``What have they developed'' might be fitting were this the behaviour of a large, market-dominating for-money application, but in fact it's a volunteer effort producing free software. You attitude seems to lack just a hint of proportion, and has no perspective whatsoever.
Sorry: I have the battered notes from a lecture course twenty-five years ago...
Which is all true, but I think misses one important point: you do need to consider the complexity order of your algorithms. I've seen several applications which do ludicrous O(n^2) or worse operations, and by the time they get to see a dataset large enough to provoke serious problems no-one dares touch the basic methods, so all that's left is local code optimisation or throwing more hardware at the problem. And if the problem is that you used an O(n^2) sort rather than an O(n.log(n)) sort, or you computed a cross-product of two large tables O(n^2) at least for both space and time), or you needlessly wrote some hideous O(n!) search which is NP complete, then no amount of profiling and instruction tuning is ever going to help you. I think that at the outset of a design process, it's important to consider the complexity order of any algorithm used which has the potential to process large amounts of data, as otherwise you can see some startlingly bad performance problems as you scale.
I have more than once taken a bag of peanuts onto a train or plane as a snack. What's next: frisking for nuts? I must confess, I would need a lot of convincing that the risks for people who claim nut allergy are remotely as severe as is made out. We live in a world surrounded by nuts: they are a staple snack for sale wherever you buy fuel for your car, are routinely sold and consumed on trains (even from the onboard shop or the refreshment trolley) and I was served them as part of a snack on a plane only a couple of weeks ago. Were the problem as severe as is made out, there should be deaths in large quantity, and there simply aren't. Indeed, the last time I tried to find out, there hadn't been a single death in the UK in some years. What appears to happen is that vague irritation type allergies have been inflated into potential death. If I eat hazelnuts my lips swell slightly. If I'm exposed to cat dust the same thing happens. A bit of anti-histamine helps, or after an hour it goes down. Given the uncontrolled nuts present in society (they may be controlled in primary schools, but no-where else) and the absence of death, I think it's as much overreaction as reality. More, probably.
Indeed, if you fly on a Japanese plane to or from Japan, especially in winter, you'll see quite a lot of people wearing masks, as in the streets or on a train.
That's going to come as news to Mumm, as their Cuvee Napa is going to have some problems. There are endless `methode champagnoise' wines made, in California, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. You just can't call them champagne. Similarly, you can't call US-style whiskies Bourbon unless they're made in Bourbon (much to Jack Daniels' rue), Scotch-style whiskies Scotch unless they're made in Scotland (much to Suntory's rue) and so on. This isn't trademark law, but it's enforced through a complex web of agreements over national and regional origin.